The U.S. government has been commissioning films and videos for decades for every purpose imaginable, paid for with our tax dollars. We have free use of these non-copyrighted materials because they belong to the Public Domain. Before internet distribution, you would have to physically be in the same room as the archives to access the material. Now volunteers at Public Resource are serving the public interest by digitizing and uploading the collection slowly and steadily regardless of where the video falls on the banality to mind-exploding-awesomeness scale.

You could cut together some amazing shorts with this footage. Strip off the audio tracks, use the orchestral scores, the bizarre voice overs, mix together video images, rotoscope the action, the possibilities are endless. And there are wild gems in the collection that are just worth watching as is. Above is “The Mind Benders“, an interesting short about hallucinogens. Below is a strikingly designed animated film, “Man and Safety” about Man and how fallible and easily confounded he is by his own pathetic limitations, as if it was produced by a superior race of alien cyber wizards with a penchant for mid-century graphic design.

The easiest way to view and preview the movies is on the collection’s YouTube channel. Then, if you like what you see, the easiest way to download the video file for your own use is searching the same title on the Internet Archive in the FedFlix collection.